"Peace in the Middle East -- An impossibility," quoth Moshe Sharon

Professor Moshe Sharon has clearly asserted the impossibility of peace in the Middle East. I would amend this to say that under present and foreseeable circumstances peace between the Arabs and Israel is impossible. As Sharon points out the main obstacle to peace is the Arab-Muslim attitude toward non-believers, especially the Jews whom they have oppressed as dhimmis for more than a thousand years. Their religion commands the Arabs/Muslims to make perpetual war against non-Muslim states --with truces allowed when this is for the ultimate benefit of the Muslim war machine, to give it time to rearm and regroup-- until the whole world is brought under the rule of Islam. The name that Muslims give to war for conquering the lands of non-believers [kuffar] is jihad. When non-believers are overwhelmingly militarily superior to the Muslims and are perceived by the Muslims as willing and able and ready to use that military superiority against them, then the Muslims can be very peaceful.

Sharon shows up the fatuity or the cynicism of the "peace processors" and "peacemongers" of varied and sundry stripes. Here are Sharon's words:
In the present situation in the Middle East:

On one hand, they [the Arabs] arm themselves well and get ready for war. On the other hand, they speak about "peace" and even publish "peace plans" every so often, which are meant to turn Israel into a narrow, indefensible piece of land, which can be conquered in a single offensive.
Various Israeli governments and the American State Department which is influenced by the Saudis, backed up by misled communications media, lacking information and defeatist, have convinced themselves and the public for years that the moment that the Arabs sign an agreement, whether a "peace treaty" or any other agreement, they will of necessity also honor it. While doing so, they [the Arabs] have always demanded that Israel pay for such pieces of paper with territory that is vital for its [Israel's] defense. But the Arabs have proven again and again that they only fulfill the clauses of an agreement that they choose to fulfill and only as long as it is worthwhile for them to fulfill them [such clauses].
. . . . .
Not much remains of the "peace treaty" with Egypt beyond a piece of paper which represents a continuing cease fire, much like the ones that existed between 1956-1957, 1968-1973, and 1973-1979.
Egypt takes first place in the world in antisemitic publications and their distribution. This is only one of the crude violations of the peace treaty with Israel. Even Jordan --the very existence of which is dependent on the protection that Israel grants it-- does not fulfill all of the clauses of the peace treaty that it signed, and its communications media spread anti-Israel poison. [Nativ, January 2008]
[MORE TO COME]

Sharon correctly mentions the US State Department as a problem, which he sees as stemming from its susceptibility to Saudi pressure. But he apparently does not see the State Dept as representing a much more major and central problem than he realizes. Furthermore, he attributes the State Dept's problematic nature to Saudi influence. This does not explain why the State Dept was hostile to Jews before the Holocaust in the 1930s and during the Holocaust from 1939 to 1945. In that period, Saudi oil was just beginning to be developed and the Saudi royal family had nowhere near the wealth that it possesses today, and indeed the kingdom was fairly new as kingdoms go, having been established only in 1925, as the kingdom of Nejd & Hijaz, with British approval. The Saudis modestly applied their dynastic name to the kingdom in 1932, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but their influence was very minor before King `Abdul-`Aziz ibn Sa`ud met with President Franklin Roosevelt in early 1945 on his way home from the Yalta Conference.

Sharon is professor emeritus of Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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